I hate to be that (negative) guy, but I'm starting to get really tired of Dalton constantly pissing all over twitter. Particularly because he's competing against them. I'm an App.net backer, and I think it's cool what he's doing, but FFS, let someone else carry the water, if it even needs carrying at all. This all just feels really petty and whiney, particularly when you're already at work solving the problem.

I had no idea who he is, and that he is competing with Twitter. I would have welcomed a disclaimer about his conflict of interests somewhere in the post.

Even better than talking someone out of money is to get them to pay you without even knowing they are paying. A landlord I rented from once did this with the rent, managing to raise rents with most tenants not noticing.

Here's how they did it. Rent was $550/month with a one year lease, which works out to $6600/year.

When the least expired, you had the option of going month to month, or signing another lease. Month to month would be $600/month ($7200/year). However, they said, if you'll sign another one year lease, they'll let you keep the old rate ($6600/year), which will be implemented by giving you one month free. That is, you'll pay $0 for January, then $600/month for the remaining 11 months of the year, bringing the total to $6600/year.

A year later, when it was time to renew again, they told people rent would probably be going up soon, but if they renewed now for another year, they could avoid the increase and just keep paying $600/month.

Since that is what people were already paying, most did not see this as a rent increase. Yet they would be paying $7200 for the year, as opposed to $6600 for the year before--a $600 increase--because this time there was no free month for signing the lease.